Archive for January, 2009

That morgan freeman guy think just because he sum kind of softwear enginear and he been in all those movies with ashlee jud that he some kind of no-it-all but we hacked his precious blog!!1! He big fat stupid repuke guy who eat meat but we show him good!! It is a golden age of hope and change and morgan freeman needs to learn to get behind Obama rite now and stop making his big dumb stupid movies!!1!

Morgan freeman supposed to no something about network security and stuff but we hacked his site so this is really sweet!! We did!! We are smart liberals so you dumb repubs on morgan freeman’s blog you need to stop listening to Rush and do what Obama say! You do it now!!

You here us morgan freeman? That shawshank movie you made was so dum! It was! Timothy robbins was the only good thing in it and you sucked big time!! You need wake up morgan freeman it a whole new country now, we liberals are running the show now and we all about diversitee and tolerance and more tolerance until the whole place is bursting with tolerance and stupid repukes like you can’t take it anymore and start barfing and begging us “please liberals stop drowning me in this tolerance stuff because I big stupid repukelican and I can’t take it no more” but we keep on doing it!! Because wee’re all about tolerance and we’re going to keep on tolerating everything and making you tolerate things too, and if you get in our way of tolerating things we’re going to put our big liberal boots right up your neocon asses!!1! Take that!!

Lest we forget, former House Majority Leader Dick Gephardt called President Bush “a miserable failure” in a presidential debate on September 4, 2003.

This witticism was taken up by Michael Moore and other leftwing internet scamps, who did their best to make sure that any Google search for the phrase “miserable failure” would return a link to President Bush’s official White House biography as its top result.

But now that Mr. Obama’s official biography now resides on that same page, the Solons at Google have decided this is unacceptable.

Though the spirit of change may be in the air in Washington, some things apparently stay the same. Yes, the old online prank called “Googlebombing” returned for a brief while recently, when Google searches for the words words [failure] and [cheerful achievement] returned President Obama’s biography as the top result.

You may remember this issue from a few years ago, when the query [miserable failure] led to the biography of President Bush. For some reason, all those links pointing to the Bush bio were redirected to Obama’s. Some people have asked in the past whether these results are a sign of political bias on Google’s part, and we’ve explained that this isn’t the case.

Rather than edit these prank results by hand, we developed an algorithm a few years ago to detect Googlebombs. We tend not to run it all the time, because it takes some computing power to process our entire web index and because true Googlebombs are quite rare (we joke around the Googleplex that more articles have been written about Googlebombs than there are actual examples of Googlebombs).

After we became aware of this latest Googlebomb, we re-ran our algorithm and it detected the Googlebomb for [cheerful achievement] as well as for [failure]. As a result, those search queries now return discussion about the Googlebombs rather than the original pages that were returned. [emphasis duplicated from Sweetness & Light post]

Huh. Well, to be fair, this one should go into the ever-thickening “Change Obama Is Really Making And Just By Being His Statuesquely Righteous Awesome Self” file folder. Hope! Change!

Maybe I should mend my ways and start writing letterspraying.

I’m gonna go watch me Bruce Almighty one more time to give myself some more ideas of what to put in my next letter to He Who Has Ended Googlebombing. I can do without the seven fingers and my girlfriend already has huge tits, but I like that thing with moving all the cars out of the way so I can zip on down the street in my Saleen S7 whenever I want.

If ya can’t lick ‘em, join ‘em.

Feel free to leave me some more ideas for my letter in the comments below.

I was scanning over fellow Right Wing News contributor Dr. Melissa Clouthier‘s thoughts about the way Sarah Palin was treated in the election last year. I thought it would be good to jot down some theories I’ve had rattling around in my head, which I can’t prove but can’t disprove either. Some of them cannot remain in this uncertain state with the passage of time, so this should be a handy list to keep on hand in the years ahead.

Had womens’ suffrage never been enacted, Sarah Palin would be the President right now.

Yeah, that one can’t ever be proven or disproven. And, obviously, what I mean to say is “if somehow the chicks could run but couldn’t vote.” And then there’s the matter of that old guy she was running with, whose name escapes me.

People who dislike Sarah Palin, by and large, hate her. Most of them are women. The men who do this, write like women and they probably throw baseballs that way too.

Those men would not be able to take on the average Palin-voting man in a fist fight. I doubt like hell they could prevail in an election…among just men. Nope, so far, every manly-men I’ve met, likes and respects Sarah Palin — or, at the very least, while voting against her nevertheless acknowledged she was probably qualified for the office she sought.

An indispensible part of this frothy anti-Palin rage that possessed so much weight in determining the election outcome last year, was female jealousy. I never did see the gentlemen contribute much toward the “come hate Palin with us!” movement. Crab-in-a-bucket syndrome. You’re prettier than me, and I’ll be damned if you’re going to live in the White House when I won’t be…said the other women.

If womens’ suffrage revoked the right to vote from men, we’d still make it to 2009 without a single female President.

Getting a female in the House of Representatives or the Senate is relatively easy, because most women would be willing to do it. You stick out when you want to, the rest of the time you fade into the crowd of fellow senators. It takes an unusual woman to fill an executive position — one in which, sometimes, you might wish the ground would swallow you up and cloak you in comforting anonymity, but you simply don’t have that option. Parents and teachers who are responsible for the upbringing of both boys and girls, will readily admit, they inculcate the boys to this uncomfortable position with much more regularity and vigor than the girls. If they don’t admit that, they’re damned liars.

Boys and girls are simply not brought up the same way. To presume men and women are exactly the same, is just stupid. To continue to think so, against the evidence that comes along to assault your theory, is borderline insane. Women tend to recoil from the prospect of sticking out from the crowd. Many women don’t recoil from this, but if they are indeed ready to take on the challenges of true individuality, they’re ready in a way different from the equivalent gentleman because they’ll insist on doing it on their terms. They tend to insist on more control over it than men do.

Ridicule? That’s quite out of the question. This is why, when you see a television commercial about a pain reliever or a cleaning product, even a cleaning product that has to do with cars, when one half of the married couple is using “Brand X” and in need of correction, it’s the man. Men can take ridicule.

People say a lot about what it’s like to be President of the United States; most of the folks who comment about this, like me, have never been President. So allow me to join their ranks with a contribution no one’s quite made yet, at least, not very often: When you’re the United States President, someone, somewhere, is going to make a fool out of you. Often. And you’ll know it. If you’re not cool with that, it’s not the job you should be seeking.

Women are smart. And they don’t need to be told…most of them should not be seeking this job. So they don’t. We do not have any sinister, wrinkly, old, “Wear Neckties At Midnight” white-guy star chambers with secret handshakes conspiring to keep women out of the White House.

We don’t need ‘em for that. It’s the women. Most of them just don’t want to go there.

If Nancy Pelosi didn’t have two years to show us how awful a “First Woman X” could be, Hillary would’ve been nominated.

We’re just not all that thrilled with seeing the “First Woman X” anymore. In fact, if the first woman to walk on the moon took her stroll tomorrow at high noon, you wouldn’t know anything about it, and you wouldn’t know anything about it because you wouldn’t want to know anything about it.

“First Women” don’t necessarily have to be good women. They have at least the potential to be downright lousy. No one says that, but just about everyone knows it, and acts on it — and they know it because Speaker Nan has been a terrible House Speaker.

If a major political party nominated a candidate-of-color more rational and soothing than Jesse Jackson, we could’ve had a black President years ago.

Because no bigotry really got defeated in November of 2008. What happened was, in November 2008, we found out that if it is indeed around, it is incapable of dictating the outcome of an election like we had been led to believe.

How long has that been going on? We don’t know, because the only person-of-color to be seriously nominated by a major political party, was a nut. And I’m being generous with my use of the phrase “seriously nominated.”

President Obama needs to find a new gimmick in 2012, or else make some retirement plans.

This one, I think I can bet some money on.

There won’t be any “thing” for people to “be a part of.”

And we will have had four years to see what Obama policies really look like (last year, it was considered rude to even inquire as to what they might be). Seeing the wreckage of forty-eight months of policies enacted, was more than enough to sour us on Jimmy Carter.

If Sarah Palin looked more like Madeleine Albright, she would’ve received much better treatment.

I’ll bet money on that too.

Sarah Palin received a great deal of abuse — because she’s pretty. Underqualified? Cut me a megaton break. Check out some of the ugly liberal democrat women serving under the capitol dome — or better yet, some of the ugly liberal democrat women who weren’t elected to anything at all, and simply wrote some screeching feminist bromide book. Imagine them held to some litmus test, sensible or otherwise, vis a vis “qualifications.”

Average-looking women don’t like pretty women. Not unless the pretty woman keeps her mouth shut, her opinions to herself, and floats around as a bit of human fluff, completely harmless, capable of being a universal peer to…whoever. Good looks, strong opinion, support from fellow females: She can pick just two of those.

Nine out of ten Obama voters who think Sarah Palin is an underqualified embarrassment, can’t list from memory three things Palin really said.

They get so cranky when you point out they get their news from Saturday Night Live, and The Daily Show. No they don’t! No they don’t! They watch Keith Olbermann too!

Nice try, but if you talk to them for a few minutes you realize they really do get their news from The Daily Show.

And so far, every embarrassing “gaffe” they attribute to Palin, actually came out of the mouth of Tina Fey. Occasionally I’ll meet one who understands Palin said something slightly different, and can recite her actual statement, insisting that’s just as embarrassing as the way Fey re-worded it. But that’s the power of comedy for you. What Palin said wasn’t really just as embarrassing, or even, embarrassing at all. If it was, there’d be no need to re-word it. And no currency awarded to Tina Fey, for having done so.

What liberals love about America, is what they love about America after America has been “changed.”

We’ll be such a wonderful country, as soon as we finish dishing out some endless litany of apologies.

You single, available studs out there, I’d like you to start wooing the object of your affection this way. Shower her with platitudes about how wonderful she will be when you’re done changing her.

Bet you won’t win that election. You might even get a restraining order filed against you.

In the local re-enactment of this fateful, three-way gunfight, the part of Clint Eastwood was played by an RCMP member, a dumbbell played the part made famous by Lee Van Cleef and the part played by Eli Wallach was effortlessly portrayed by a Glad sandwich bag full of marijuana. The member walked into a room to speak to a young man regarding a missing person investigation he was conducting. While he was asking the young dope about the whereabouts of the missing person, the member spotted the bag of cannabis sitting on the counter top. The dumbbell noticed the bag at about the same instant. The dumbbell looked at the Constable, the Constable glared at the baggy, the baggy looked to the dumbbell, the Constable stared at the dumbbell, the dumbbell looked nervously at the baggy and so it continued until the dumbbell slowly sidestepped towards the baggy while his eyes were locked with the Constables and he made his move and drew first. That is to say he took off his ball cap and placed it over the bag of wacky-tobacky and started to move back to his original position. The Constable returned fire with, “you really are as stupid as you look. Aren’t you?” and the baggy was seized as evidence, never to fulfil it’s true destiny. Music fades, roll credits.

Read it all, and don’t miss the part about the mighty lion on the prowl and the stupid antelope stopping to nibble some (real) grass.

The Heritage Foundation would like to know why this stimulus plan…this stimulus plan, that is getting stinkier and stinkier as each debate-free minute ticks by…includes $140 million for climate modelers who are having trouble finding work.

It would appear they do not actually exist. Except in the form of this demand for 140 big ones.

This raises the question of how many unemployed climate modelers are out there pounding the pavement.

When presented with that question, last Friday, Pat Michaels, former president of the American Association of State Climatologists stated “I don’t know one unemployed modeler.”

I mean, the good things goin’ on. Not this Obama stuff, which we will, mark my words, survive just fine. The liberation of our culture from the monolith media —

In the age of mass media, the press was able to define the sphere of legitimate debate with relative ease because the people on the receiving end were atomized — connected “up” to Big Media but not across to each other. And now that authority is eroding…Take a sheet of paper and make a big circle in the middle. In the center of that circle draw a smaller one to create a doughnut shape. Label the doughnut hole “sphere of consensus.” Call the middle region “sphere of legitimate debate,” and the outer region “sphere of deviance.”…Now you have a way to understand why it’s so unproductive to argue with journalists about the deep politics of their work. They don’t know about this freakin’ diagram!

There’s a little bit of Yin-and-Yang stuff involved with this. When we’re all connected to a common intellectual hub but not to each other, like spokes on a bicycle wheel, it really doesn’t matter what the hub is or what the hub tells us to do. The communication arrangement strongly compels us to think with the OFC, the Orbito-Frontal Cortex, that part of the brain that is responsible for “rapping one’s own knuckles.” Think of it as your “don’t go outside the lines” cortex. There is no because when the OFC is at work. When you shout “No!” at a baby, you’re stimulating the baby’s OFC.

It’s a survival mechanism. If you touch a hot stove, and wait for pain to register then think about the prospect of removing your hand through conventional means, you will be much more badly burned. The OFC has its place; with that lobe telling you to remove your hand, you’ve got a decent shot at recoiling before you sustain any physical damage at all. That would not be possible otherwise. To preserve our ability to procreate and survive, we have to route some experiences through this special “because-free” zone.

Well, when people are communicating with a common nucleus but not with each other, they’re strongly motivated to think with the OFC. And when you introduce some limited means by which they can communicate with each other — just a few minutes over the fence that divides their lawns, or at the water cooler at work — they tend to persuade each other to do cognitive thinking with the OFC. No cause-and-effect, just don’t-do-that, like back in kindergarten. All protocol. No real weighing of costs vs. benefits of available options.

I found out about the article from Kate at Small Dead Animals, and Alice the Camel…they, in turn, make the point that this is probably why the press reacts so vituperatively to blogs. The blog is disorganized, and yet, strangely, at the same time organized. It provides a reliable and sustained means by which thinking consumers of news can talk to each other about what it is they have seen. It erodes the revenue base of advertising, to a certain extent, and that’s turning out to be damaging enough to the Old Guard. But it also erodes that spoke-hub atomization authority.

It gets people thinking with the cerebral cortex, the way the Good Lord intended when He built it. That part of the brain you use for cause-and-effect thinking, inferential thinking, process-of-elimination, all that good stuff. The traditional knuckle-rapping is demoted to just an occasional, meaningless staccato within a symphony of more honest deliberation.

I agree with Fat in Indiana. It’s like the folks writing this nonsense, don’t want the country to succeed — difficult to see how anyone could deny or question it, and remain intellectually diligent and honest about the matter.

Well … at least the Republicans stood fast yesterday in the House. They were joined by several Democrats in opposing this $825 billion government growth bill. Now it’s off to the Senate…I love what House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer said yesterday in response to criticism of the government growth plan. “Americans voted for change.” There you go. The Democrat’s answer for every objection to a Democrat atrocity? Does Obama’s focus group created slogan give Democrats a clear field to destroy our free market economy and burden your children and grandchildren with a bill they may never be able to repay? Oh yeah…we did all of this because Americans voted for change. What a jerk. What an asinine and arrogant response to the valid concerns of many Americans.

Just think about this stuff for a minute or two. We imagine this as a discourse between the weak and the strong, who in turn are positioned oppositionally…what benefits one side automatically injures the other side. We imagine it that way not because reality counsels us to, but because the democrat party counsels us to.

Even those who say they are championing the cause of the weak…the voiceless (hah!) weak…acknowledge the weak are dependent on the strong. Hell, they’re the ones making it that way.

Now, how would you destroy a civilized country? I really can’t think of a better way. Make the degenerates dependent on the functional, pump up the ranks of the degenerates to the point where they outnumber the functional, then use those votes to see to it the functional can no longer function.

You couldn’t do this kind of damage to a country in an entire century — overthrowing Saddam Hussein over and over again, every five years.

Cheer away. But, it should be obvious to anyone with a working brain, chuck some footwear at our new hopey changey President and nobody, from anywhere on the political spectrum, from sea to shining sea, will lift a finger to protect you.

Remember that four-minute clip that had our good blogger friend Buck ready to vomit in his own shoes before it reached the two-minute mark?

Last week Big Hollywood drew attention to a 4:13 video directed by Demi Moore and starring [Ashton] Kutcher and fifty-six of their famous friends and intended to “illustrate how they will help make the nationwide change, inspired by President-elect Barack Obama, a reality.”

One of the central tenets of the pledge is to be more neighborly.

From the script — “I pledge”:

Ioan Gruffudd: “to meet my neighbors”…
Rex Lee: “Find out their names”…
Cameron Diaz: “I am gonna give ‘em a smile”…
Tatyana Ali: “And ask them how I can be of service to them”…

The smiling and community service-mindedness ended Thursday morning on the affluent side of Beverly Hills. According to TMZ, “Kutcher went absolutely insane when he was woken up by a neighbor who started construction on a house at 7:30 in the morning.”

Wearing his morning fedora, Kutcher chose to videotape and chronicle the inconvenience online.

Among Kutcher’s early morning Twitter offerings:

“this SOB owl feces cougar placenta jack bone dick!”

“Jack ass 7am building a goddamn fort next to my house f’in up my view and noise polluting the entire f’in neighborhood with pounding steal”

The issue is the bonus paid to Wall Street executives. Bonuses. Bonuses for I-don’t-even-know-how-many “executives” or what exactly it is that they do.

Our current President has never allowed a dearth of information to get in the way of a frothy opinion, though. For a guy with such a rep for this “calm demeanor” I keep reading about, No-Drama-Obama can really go on a tear when He wants to:

Overpaid Wall Street executives and employees are a rather easy target these days.

So it didn’t take long for President Obama and Vice President Biden to respond today with outrage to the New York state comptroller’s report that despite the financial meltdown and the federal bailout, bonuses totaled more than $18 billion last year.

The New York Times front-page story this morning said that was the sixth largest total in history, though it also noted that it was the largest drop on record, from about $33 billion in 2007.

“Outrageous” was Obama’s reaction, according to spokesman Robert Gibbs.

Obama told reporters that the bonuses are not right when the firms were seeking help from taxpayers, who are tightening their own belts and were being warned that the financial system could not fail.

“That is the height of irresponsibility,” the president said.

“It is shameful,” Obama added.

“And part of what we’re going to need is for folks on Wall Street who are asking for help to show some restraint and show some discipline and show some sense of responsibility. The American people understand that we’ve got a big hole that we’ve got to dig ourselves out of — but they don’t like the idea that people are digging a bigger hole even as they’re being asked to fill it up.”

Biden agreed, and went further. “It offends the sensibilities,” Biden said in an interview on CNBC. “I’d like to throw these guys in the brig. I do know what they are thinking, and they are thinking of the same old thing that got us here: Greed. They are thinking: ‘Take care of me.'” [emphasis mine]

If there’s something to indicate “these guys” didn’t earn the money they were paid, it was left out of the story. I haven’t been elected to anything yet — but be that as it may, on my planet, that means they probably earned it.

And if they earned it, it’s not the “height of irresponsibility” to pay it to them.

Is this some alternative meaning of the word “bonus”? When I’ve received bonuses, by the first quarter of that year — that would be January, a year ago — there was some gleaning of how the bonuses were to be earned. Maybe that’s not always binding…in fact, it usually isn’t, it’s contingent on how well the company does…but the actual pay-out is just following through on these guidelines that were set up previously. I know Obama and Biden don’t want me to have a decent working memory, but I do gots me one, and I remember all this bailout-this and tumbling-Dow-that started up somewhere around the end of the third quarter of ’08. Not all private companies did okay before that point. But many did. Many did more than okay.

Frankly, I’m outraged by the President and Vice-President’s attempt to make this look like a December-25 itch-between-the-ears, when they damn well know that isn’t the case.

But here’s what really frosts me:

What the hell is an economy, anyway? It’s people paying people to do stuff. Right? Goods, services. That means, people and companies pay money to other people and companies, in order to acquire a claim on their time and treasure.

Sometimes, there’s no difference between a job being done adequately, and a job done excellently. None whatsoever.

Other times, there’s a huge difference. This is why you tip the waiter and hostess when it’s your first date with the lady and you really want to get into her pants. It’s also the reason why people earn bonuses in certain industries…like the financial industry. Obama & Biden are supposed to be pretty sharp guys. I would imagine they’re plenty bright enough to see how, when you acquire financial services from financial professionals, you’d care about getting excellent service rather than “eh” service. So there are probably going to be bonuses paid.

In fact, let’s take another look at this part —

The New York Times front-page story this morning said that was the sixth largest total in history, though it also noted that it was the largest drop on record, from about $33 billion in 2007. [emphasis mine]

Okay, then.

Financial people — who are going to be the very first to be paid bonuses, one could reasonably assume, out of pretty much the entire economy — are paid bonuses. Most of the time, out of a plan that has been in place throughout all of 2008, the first two-thirds of which were alright. The bonus payout was therefore mostly just follow-through. And it was a decline from last year’s figure of about half.

The amount of money these folks did manage to scoop up, is offensive to Smug-n-Plugs — oh, dear. I guess they’d like NYC to be out another billion.

Just something to file away, I guess, when they say they want to stimulate and revive “the economy.” If these guys aren’t trying to fool people, then it comes down to this: They wouldn’t know what an “economy” is, if it ran up and bit ‘em square in the nuts. They have a problem with people working, and as a result of getting the work done, being paid big money. When that happens, in fact, Joe Biden wants someone thrown “in the brig.” And by big money, I mean money outside what’s normal. What they consider to be normal. They won the election, and now they want to define what normal is…with some jail time to back it up, if Biden has his druthers.

Folks — that is socialism.

Update: One can’t help but wonder: Are those overpaid, evil Wall Street bonus recipient executives indulging in Wagyu steak?

Update: I wonder what cheeriogirl would think of the dichotomy? I’ve got a gut feeling you could spend an entire year showing it to her, and she’d never quite see it.

I cannot tell you how much better I feel with [Barack Obama] at our helm.

Nice clear rules to follow, set out ahead of time. There will be no counting to three for infractions from this President!

I also love how he warns that his newly administered rules INCLUDE the SPIRIT of the law, and how he holds himself accountable to all of these rules. Obama does not, and has not ever considered himself above the law.

The fifty-fourth Best Sentence I’ve Heard Or Read Lately (BSIHORL) award goes out this morning to Ann Coulter for the uppercut at the end of her latest column, Liberal Victimhood: A Game You Can Play at Home. She makes the case that for half a century or more, liberals have energized their supporters, and even non-supporters, into doing nonsensical things by playing the victim…then closes with this zinger.

…ironically, Obama’s father is from Africa: He never suffered from the ancient policies that, today, give his son Victim Gold. To the contrary, if Obama’s African relatives had anything to do with slavery, it was on the business end.

I’m biased in favor of Ms. Coulter because this was something I’d been noticing of late. But I don’t blame the liberals — they’re just trying to win elections, something politicians are supposed to do.

What I find much more worthy of thought, is the misbehavior of the rest of us. My thoughts, also, are more directed at the third-person-hood of victimology. We don’t need to see any tangible connection between the guy who wants us to do something stupid, and the purported victim, to lose all or most of our cognitive wherewithal.

Who owns this business?

The business owner.

How are the wages of the employees determined?

They negotiate them with the business owner when they are hired.

Who decides whether to build a wheelchair ramp?

The business owner.

Who decides whether breastfeeding is allowed in the restaurant?

The business owner.

What do you do if you don’t like the decision he makes about that?

Eat somewhere else.

And how do we…ZOMFG!! LOOK AT THAT POOR OLD MAN HE STUBBED HIS TOE, OR GOT DISCRIMINATED AGAINST!! OR THERE’S A FLY IN HIS SOUP OR HIS PECKER DOESN’T WORK OR HE CAN’T GET A GREEN CARD!!

There’s a little bit of this absurd exchange in all of us. We understand who-owns-what decision, and we act on that understanding, right up until we find out that someone got a raw deal somewhere. Then we suddenly enter this bizarro world, in which nobody is really responsible for anything as an individual. Everything anybody does, is everybody else’s business; the most competent way to get money spent is to route it through the government. When you wake up first thing in the morning, is it your opinion that the most responsible way to spend money is to get it spent through the government? I’ll bet not. I’ll bet even some of you who are on the DNC’s mailing list, show the proper skepticism, at least until the focus-group propaganda goons go to work on you. How about in the moment in which you retire for the night, hmmm? Think the government can spend money more effectively than you can, nickel-for-nickel? What about in most of the waking moments in between, what’s your opinion then, typically?

So how come your perception of the world around you, shifts so dramatically, in the few seconds in which you’re feeling sorry for someone?

It is, in 2009, the most effective and reliable way to poison individuality and reason. Just find a victim…somewhere. A barrel of reasoning power is undone by a half-pint of good old-fashioned compassion — gone awry, alchemized into a toxic lace. It throws rational thinking off. People falling in love, think more clearly than people feeling sorry for someone.

We do NOT need to be told a believable story about how the spending of this money will help the injured person. We pretend we need this, but we don’t. Go on, review some of these outlandish tales about how things were going to be fixed. Look at the most recent one — stimulate the economy. And where was that money going to go if it wasn’t taxed from us in the first place? We’d have put it in a big composting heap in the backyard?

Ask the “average” guy who’s more qualified…Barack Obama or Sarah Palin. Obama, of course! Then ask ‘em why…duh…er…lights go out. The subject is changed, or some droning stream of Tina Fey quotes slowly plops out of their cakeholes. The fact of the matter is that it really is the most naked form of racism you can find nowadays. Obama and Palin are both fine speechmakers — they both stumble, embarrassingly, now and then if you wait long enough for them to do so. They’re just about on par.

But a bubbly, precocious hockey-mom is expected to talk the way Sarah Palin does. Black guys, on the other hand, are supposed to be angry. That’s what this “There’s Something About Him!” really means; the “something about” Obama is that our society has been conditioned to expect a sulking, smoldering heap of a rap-star dude wherever we see a black male, and for those who’ve bought into this, Obama personally offers a rather disorienting departure from the stereotype. Enter the victimology. Someone is portrayed as a victim, and suddenly large numbers of people are persuaded toward silly, nonsensical things.

I don’t know what causes us to do this. The theory I have found most worthy of entertainment, is that there is an unspoken preciousness to the event in which we demonstrate our inner decency to those around us…or are simply given an opportunity to do this. Someone loses something in a house fire, I give ‘em a dollar, I’m a righteous dude. Maybe that someone was a millionaire, maybe the thing lost was sentimental and can’t be replaced with all the money in the world. It doesn’t matter. Look how decent I am! And the wonderful thing is, if I keep all my money in my pocket and vote the victim a large bundle of your dollars…I’m still just as wonderful. For the moment.

This is a thirst that is never, ever quenched for very long. The decency has to be proven over, and over, and over again. Real decency would only have to be showcased once, if at all.

I don’t like that theory, but it has endured. The reason I don’t like it is that if it’s true, those among us who are most lacking in inner decency, would be the most enamored of the opportunities to advertise it falsely. So someone who really does see blacks and whites on equal footing, won’t place too much value on an event in which he can manifest that he does so. Obama’s victory would therefore be a sign not so much that bigotry has ended in America, but that it has softened. And, furthermore, if you wish to seek out instances of it, you’re better off looking among those who voted Obama/Biden, than among those who voted for the opposition. They had/have a great deal more to prove.

Geraldine Ferraro — you can tell this by the great hurry in which she was shushed up — was right. I’m reasonably sure a theoretical white guy named “Barack Hussein Obama” with all the personal privileges of the real black one, and a similar bunch of America-hating friends, wouldn’t have gotten terribly far.

I still remember how it stung when I found out Ross Perot was crazy, and how this disuaded me from supporting the very idea of third parties for years afterward. Actually, right up until this week. But I also remember how Arnie was elected Governor of California. Gray Davis won the 2002 election, and we were scolded, tut-tutted, knuckle-rapped, that “The People Had Spoken” and Gov. Davis was the representation of that will, don’t we dare question it. The recall petition, therefore, was pre-destined to fail. Well, now. That isn’t how history unfolded, is it.

I’m looking at President Obama and I’m seeing another Gray Davis. The representation of vox populi…”mandate” and everything…we shall not question it…but what does one say, when we do so question, and this popularly-elected official is popped like a soap bubble Gray-Davis style?

I don’t understand Obama’s base at all, and I understand very little of what’s popular. But I do understand there is a common theme to the dissatisfaction simmering nationwide lately, and Obama’s policies, to the extent they can be defined, don’t seem to address this theme much.

Maybe it’s time.

If I wrote the platform, I notice I wouldn’t have to choose between “What I Know Is Right Come Hell Or High Water” and “What The People Want”. Those two appear to have merged. And they merge here…

Don’t Pass On More Debt to Our Children.

How would a party like that work out? It seems to me, if the Obama voters are being honest, a large chunk of their crowd would swarm over to my new party. How many times have we heard it…”spending under George W. Bush at an all time high, public debt swelled to ten trillion, expen$ive War in Iraq costing umpthyfratz billion a day, blah blah blah.” Would it not be fair to say this is part of Obama’s “mandate,” even though The Chosen One doesn’t seem to be acting on it?

I’d say, let’s take baby steps. Let’s start with passing on a public debt to our children, equal to or lesser than what it is now — adjusted for inflation. Let’s define a generation as twenty years.

Yes I know how the public debt swelled over the last eight years. The George Bush compromise was, support the military operations in Afghanistan and Iraq, mister democrat congressman, and I’ll put my signature under any feel-good social program you care to name. Maybe that’s just the way people behave once they get real power. Maybe it was even the responsible thing to do. I gotta admit, if you make me choose between a President who’s willing to bribe a congressman to protect the country, and a congressman who’s going to bitch and piss and moan about “war crimes” until he gets his bribe and then suddenly shuts up…I know which one I’d trust more, and it isn’t the congressman.

But I simply can’t get behind this. President Freeberg would have said, this is the right thing to do, and if you don’t support it I’ll do everything I can to make sure you pay a cost for failing to protect the country at the voting booth. And you won’t get one nickel of spending past my veto pen over this.

But then again, President Freeberg probably wouldn’t have achieved that compromise, or any other. It’s very likely President Freeberg would have been stuck in a shouting match with Congress, with no troops mobilized anywhere.

Still and all, I can’t accept that we need to nearly double our public debt anytime some asshole like Saddam Hussein starts making trouble for the sake of making trouble.

From what I’m gathering, the democrats are getting elected by faking this “responsible stewardship of nation’s purse strings” thing. Their support comes from the idea that Former President Bush, all by his lonesome, stuck a valve in the public debt innertube and started pump pump pumping away. I think the electorate voted for whoever would pay the debt down, or at least quit racking it up. This other stuff democrats want…tax cuts are evil, we need Europe to like us moar better, you’re not a citizen you’re a serf, every little thing different about you makes you part of a complaining advocacy group, all men are rapists, guns iz bad, ten commandments are offensive, black people can’t make it without help, seventy languages are better than one, and my all-time favorite, all elections were stolen unless the democrat won ‘em — the public is not, repeat not, on board.

I think the public wants fiscal conservatism.

I think they’re sold on the notion that tax hikes aren’t the answer. I think if you pass a true-false test around, with one question: “If you raise a tax rate 20%, you collect 20% more revenue” — the vast majority will, rightfully, choose FALSE. Furthermore, I think the public understands it is not only possible, but probable, that the public policy can raise more money by cutting tax rates.

But I think they further understand that raising the revenue is not the problem. Spending the revenue is the problem. Congress is entrusted with a responsibility of which, by design, it can never be worthy. My guys are doing a great job, your guys are demanding all these stupid line items in the budget we don’t really need. The system is not hospitable to the process of trying to bring a budget under control. We know this for a fact, because we have pretty much the same governmental structure in the states and they’re having exactly the same problem.

This is the source of the public’s discontent. They desperately want to send the message to Washington that spending should be brought under control — we don’t want all these feel-good programs, we don’t see ourselves as that weak, and we don’t need some burgeoning, bloated, tricked-out nanny state to tell us when our kids need to be wearing seat belts, or to put miniature trampolines under the trees for when those poor squirrels fall out of ‘em.

And they don’t want a huge mess o’bailouts.

That’s why it’s so rare for the politicians to really come out and support the bailouts. It’s always the other guy supporting them. The guy you’re talking to, he hasn’t got a word to say about it, he just votes for the bailout.

That’s wrong, and the electorate knows it. They want it fixed. This time, neither one of the major parties is up to the task…or if either one really is, it isn’t really inspiring confidence in that department.

I couldn’t watch the swearing-in ceremony last night. The spectacle was so disgusting I just turned off the television.

This was the mastermind behind the last bailout plan and TARP .. the “Troubled Asset Relief Program.” Yeah, that’s working real well, isn’t it? Yup, there was Timothy Geithner, tax cheat extraordinaire, being sworn in as the Secretary of the Treasury. This, my friends, is change we can believe in.

Geithner can thank his lucky stars that he’s a Democrat. There is just no way in the world that he would ever have been confirmed had he been a Republican. The media and the Democrats would have been on him like a crow on a June bug. We have an economic crisis, so we’re told that its just fine if we have a willful tax cheat running the department that includes the Internal Revenue Service.

You shouldn’t have been wondering about it anyway. Republicans and capital-L Libertarians agree on it (and where those two agree, you’ll notice, nobody else is really arguing, they’re just rushing to change the subject): You want less of something, you tax it. You want more of something, subsidize it.

If we were to tax income at a hundred percent, the revenues from such a tax would be next to nothing. We don’t need to start doing it to find out for sure, do we. It’s something that simply is. If you have zero tax receipts at zero percent, and zero tax receipts at a hundred percent…there is a Laffer Curve. There is. Stop wondering about it. Stop deliberating. Some things are simple.

The only question that remains is whether we’re past the apex of the Laffer Curve. Well, after you descend past a certain depth in the House of Eratosthenes BOHICA Cycle, and California and the nation are certainly past that critical event horizon…it’s time to reckon you’re probably past the apex of the Laffer Curve. If the 2003 tax cuts worked, then that is further evidence.

Government spending! It’s what’s in style! Our problems are so bad, that nothing else will do.

But it doesn’t seem to work well (in addition to, maybe, just maybe, that’s the cause of the problems)…

State and local governments are facing even greater budget deficits than were expected a few months ago, according to a new study released Monday by the Government Accountability Office (GAO).

GAO estimates that state and local governments will face a cumulative operating deficit of $131 billion in 2009. Deficits are set to mount in 2010, with the GAO predicting a cumulative deficit that year of $181 billion.

“The current results represent a significant deterioration from our November 2008 update,” according to a GAO letter to Sens. Max Baucus (D-Mont.) and Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa). “In November, our model depicted an operating deficit in the $100-$200 billion range.”

Golf course owners and some of their customers are teed off at Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger. So are veterinarians, auto mechanics and amusement park operators.

Their anger is directed at the Republican governor’s proposal to extend the state sales tax to cover more services, an idea that has surfaced in other states as they race to plug crippling budget deficits. The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, a research clearinghouse, predicts such deficits nationwide could reach $350 billion by 2011.

In California, Schwarzenegger wants to help close a nearly $42 billion budget deficit by taxing rounds of golf, auto repairs, veterinary care, amusement park and sporting event admissions and appliance and furniture repairs.

Democratic Gov. David Paterson in New York has proposed levies on MP3 downloads, taxi rides, movies, concerts, sporting events, and personal services such as haircuts, manicures and massages.

Best-comment-award in that thread, goes to Thomas Paine (#8) —

One of the dirty little secrets of social welfare agencies is that they are under NO incentive to reign in the number of people or the scope of services that they provide. You have a classic positive feedback loop. The more people on the dole, the more kids with an ADD diagnosis, the more illegals they can give a Medicaid Tax ID number to so they can get free medical care for life, and the more crackheads who can get signed up for SSI benefits, the more social workers get hired, with larger and larger budgets.

And don’t forget the biggest scam of all: if you’re pregnant, you come to the good ol’ USA illegally, get free prenatal care, get your baby delivered for free, and to top it all off, your baby is set for life with guaranteed Social Security benefits! Then you, your spouse and all of your relatives apply for citizenship to help with raising your baby, and YOU ALL can get benefits, too!

There are PLENTY of goodies to go around, ,even for older kids who missed out on citizenship. Just come to America and get free K-through-12 education! And when it’s time for college, don’t worry. The liberal legislators of many states allow you to get the lower in-state tuition rate! To think, not even an American citizen war veteran from the next state can qualify to get the same perk for his or her kids!

You don’t even have to be smart to figure this out. You just need a decent memory.

You get to wallow hip-deep, shoulders-deep, neck-deep, in news about how bad your state’s treasury is doing. Budgets late, state workers furloughed, deficits forecast…

…and then you read some more news about your government spending money to make sure people who are eligible for a program, know about their eligibility, so they can cost the state some more money. Yeah. Just like the way you balance your household budget. Spend money to spend money. Of course you’re doing something like that, right? When you have more outgo than income? You call the phone company or cable company and complain they forgot to include a past-due balance in your bill?

Alarm bells ought to be going off. There’s something wrong with you if they aren’t.

[F]or most guys, I am guessing that the women they remember the most — the ones that stick in their minds, the ones they never quite get over — are the ones that were the most aggressive and accessible sexually. Want to make an impression on a guy that will last forever? It doesn’t have anything to do with haircuts or fashionable purses.

Men are simple creatures. Protoplasms. It is a strange irony that a woman can pretty much get whatever she wants from a guy with no arguments and no disagreements —- nothing but “Absolutely, dear” and “Whatever you want, honey” — by doing just one thing (but doing it two or three or sometimes four times a week).

Either women don’t quite get this, or are, you know, just too complicated to act upon it.

It’s baffling that women’s magazines even exist. All those wasted pages on “How to Keep Your Man.” Any article on this topic that contains more than three words (“Screw him lots”) is missing the big picture and dwelling on trivialities.

I think CUS gets the top prize for contributions to the comment section…

I have remarked to my wife at the grocery store checkout counter that I could write every single article in Cosmo headlined ‘How to Keep you Man’, ‘How to Wow your Man in Bed’, ‘How to Keep your Man Satisfied’ etc. etc. etc.:

Give him a blow job.

And yes, it is just that simple.

Anthony, on the other hand, does a great job of capturing exactly what Dr. Helen was talking about, by typifying the status quo: Men as beasts of burden. You keep them on the “right” path, by bruising their sensitive, tender egos anytime they wander astray:

This is the saddest thing I’ve ever read by a man. The reason you are dissatisfied and perplexed by women is not that women are confused.

It’s that you are such a sorry excuse for a man.

Anthony, if you are a woman — which I believe you are — you’re ordering up more quantities of what has already frustrated you. No one’s ever pronounced a desire for a preening, pliable sycophant of a man, and there’s a reason for that. Because nobody wants one. But if you really are a fella, your position is even more absurd because you’re placing orders on what the other sex wants by proxy. Placing an order for what has never made women happy. In all of human history. Not once.

Ace is right. Quit reading heavy, expensive, petroleum-product glossy mags (which contribute to global warming, anyway) about how to do stuff, and just jump in and start doin’.

You realize how aggravated the ladies would be if men behaved this way? It would be like, dishes stacking in the sink higher and higher, night after night, while we sit around and read glossy magazines with “101 ways to get those dishes done” on the cover.

Update: Forgot to deliver a primer for those who aren’t “into blogs” and may not know what’s going on.

Glenn Reynolds does Instapundit, and Dr. Helen is his wife. That’s why everyone’s being all cutesy.

Each of them is responsible for running something remarkable and worthwhile, although their styles are diametrically opposed. He’s a linker, she’s a thinker.

There, now you know what you need to know. Except about what’s up with Anthony. That I don’t know. I’ve got a couple of ideas, and I’m not that curious about ‘em.

A teenager was repeatedly stabbed in front of his 13-year-old brother before dying in his sister’s arms.

Stephen Lewis, 15, was attacked by a gang of youths as he left a charity event aimed at campaigning against youth violence.

The irony… It is KILLING us. Fortunately for us, only in a figurative sense. Poor Stephen was not so lucky. He died as a victim of “sensible gun laws” etc. etc. etc., all aimed at rendering the subjects of the socialist nanny state utterly helpless in the face of vicious predators. And we’re not just talking about their own government here.

That link goes to Rachel Lucas, who has two other stories to go with this one. Equally disgusting.

If the science is settled that we have to do these things in order to keep the planet from dying, and everyone knows it’s the right thing to do, and it’s all about ensuring our continuing survival rather than trying to sell us a big ol’ grab bag of socialism…how come you have to wait for the right people to be in charge before you can get it sold?

Not too long ago, three regular (or semi-regular) readers came down on the head of Yours Truly for saying women couldn’t get the job done in Information Technology as well as the men…although I said no such thing, and would not have said any such thing. The subject of the article, and presumably of the thread that opened up under it, was women avoiding technical fields of their own accord. The article I linked said that women were being given choices their mothers had not been given, and they were using those choices — female choosiness led to an underrepresentation of women in data centers. They didn’t want to do it.

My comments were that women tend — are you reading? TEND. TEND. TEND. (black marker, circle, underline) — to thrive on attention. As a technical field becomes more professional and more intensive, it takes on a certain “what’ve you done for us lately?” aspect. You aren’t a miracle-worker anymore. You do exactly the same stuff you did when people put you on a pedestal and worshipped at your feet, except now you do it on an assembly line. Next miracle, next miracle, next miracle…keep it moving. No applause. No kudos. No attention.

And that is guy-work. It isn’t that I haven’t met any lady miracle workers. Quite to the contrary, I’ve met quite a few. And if they make it that far, they are generally more intelligent, more articulate and more well-rounded than the men, brain-wise. But they have to have their “strokes.” Whether they want to admit it or not, performing before an audience is integral to the job they are doing. Without the feedback they become bored and frustrated. Sure they can tolerate it. But one way or another, after a time, they’re gone.

These efforts to “recruit more women into IT” therefore become, unavoidably, a sort of dog-chasing-tail exercise. What we ignore is that among women who are capable of doing these jobs, most of them don’t want to do it…and among the women who do indeed want to do it at any given time, if you give them a few years most of them will be gone.

Goldstein at Protein Wisdom also notes that men and women are not the same. The subject under discussion here, is firefighting in the great city of Los Angeles. Once again, there is an effort to recruit women.

This time, though, the difference in ability is more pronounced — the measures taken to overcome that difference in ability, are more determined, less honest, and, after awhile, actually become dangerous…

[F]or years, nobody questioned the underlying assumptions pushed by the City Council and the city Fire Commission: that women wanted to be firefighters, that women were kept out, and that women had special skills needed on fire lines, just as female cops brought special skills to their jobs. If Bamattre was jettisoning standards and practicing the equivalent of grade inflation in order to slip women into fire stations, the thinking was that the ends justified the means.

“It is a political-correctness issue, more than one [that asks] whether it makes good sense or not,” says [former Los Angeles Mayor Richard] Riordan, chatting by phone during a ski trip to Whistler Mountain in British Columbia. “But that is a fact of life.”

Then, in 2005, City Controller Laura Chick alleged in an audit that Bamattre was engaged in a rollback of physical requirements. […]

Then last May, a former drillmaster at the Frank Hotchkins Memorial Training Center testified in Superior Court that he had been ordered by two high-ranking chiefs to pass women, and had stood up to their double standard. “I recommended termination on 95 percent of the women that could not throw that ladder,” testified Captain Scott Campos, now at Fire Station 5. “And in all cases, it was overlooked — and they were sent to the field.”

Bamattre’s alleged lowering of standards “put people out in the field that weren’t qualified,” says Lima, who won a $3.75 million judgment after he claimed his superiors retaliated against him — for making life as tough for women firefighters as he did for the men.
:
“They recruit them, and then they beat them up,” claims attorney Thomas Hoegh, who is handling at least two lawsuits against the Fire Department. “They encourage the women to join the department, then look what happens to them. They are all getting hurt badly.”

Most of the injuries, he says, “are occurring during training activities. One wonders what is going on here. There is a double standard. They are encouraging them to join, then they do everything in their power to try to get rid of them.”

But firefighter Julie Wolf — one of the rare women working on the fire line at a fire station in Los Angeles — has a different theory about what is causing the endless cycle of female hirings, washouts, injuries and lawsuits.

“Some of the women can’t do the basics because of strength,” says Wolf, a tough-talking engineer at Station 63. “Captains document it, and all of a sudden it is a ‘hostile working environment’ against the captain… I have never seen a woman overdrilled, and it has never happened to me.”

Wolf is growing tired of the recriminations — from women. “That is what we do. That is our job. All of a sudden it is humiliating and hostile for a member to perform their job? I don’t understand that.”

As a result, she says, “I think they are a bunch of crybabies. When I come to work, I am a firefighter first and a female second. I come to work and do my job.”

This is all a case of confusing the moderate with the extreme.

Whether we want to admit it or not, our goal is that for each fella doing a job, there should be a gal doing exactly the same job…at the same grade, for the same pay. One-for-one, ten-for-ten.

Anything less than that is undeniable evidence of discrimination.

At the same time, we want the women to have choices. All selections conceivable, should be available to her, and woe upon the head of anyone who gets in the way.

Well the problem that surfaces is that in addition to being able to do different things, the two sexes also want different things.

It never once seems to occur to us that a woman can exercise her choices, and as a direct consequence of that, end up being absent in that seat we just got done deciding should be filled by a female butt. We think if the fellas want to do something, it just naturally follows the women want to do it too. It doesn’t really work like that.

The other problem that comes up is that when you start talking about statistics instead of talking about potential, the anecdotal tales about women-I-knew become irrelevant. It’s a conversation about commons instead of about elites. What women can do is no longer part of it — statistical tendencies reign supreme. That’s the conversation: Statistics. That’s what we’ll be sending the bean-counters in to start counting, so the lawsuits can be filed: Statistics. What MOST men do. What MOST women do. What most women want.

I’m going to let Julie Wolf have the final say on what most women can lift. In my experience, most women don’t like it when they do something extraordinary, and nobody notices. They certainly don’t like it when the attitude they get back, is “About time…now go perform this other miracle, over here.” They don’t deal with that situation the same way the guys do.

All you fellas who want to doubt me on that one, if you’re married, why don’t you go a couple weeks without saying anything appreciative or thankful about anything your wife does for you. Let me know how that works out for ya.

I love this administration already. This is a President i can believe in. It is the coolest President of my life time. By the way, i am too young to see what Reagan, and Bush Presidents looked like.

President Obama is cool like cat, smart as whip and current as Silicon Valley nerds.

Indeed, a Change i can believe in. I can’t wait till he put the whole government business online.

Yeah, a YouTube channel just for that poor alien down in Area 51 so we know exactly how he’s being poked, prodded and waterboarded, right before He Who Walks On Water makes ‘em let the little fella go. And by the way I know nothing about any other Presidents, but this is the coolest one there’s ever been anyway.